Paul Malessa Internet Marketing

I have an idea for a website and the funds to market it, but no web experience. How to proceed?

I have a marketing background and am prepared to market an internet idea who basis is made up of bringing people to a site to sign up for a service. The site itself contains the value.

With any project of the sort the answer is always the same – depends.

So although most will start talking about the question you asked, I want to start off by asking the more important question – you have marketing background, do you have Internet marketing background? Unless you plan on doing conventional marketing to bring people to the site (which as you know can get pretty expensive), you will need to learn the ins and outs of Internet marketing first, before going forward with the idea, because you can have the best built site, and the most valueable service out there, but if you can’t bring people to the site – it is useless. But I think that goes without saying and hopefully you have that covered.

Now for the question of actual development. First point you need to consider is that quality development costs a lot. As you say that you have no web experience, I am certain you have very vague, if any, idea about how much that ‘a lot’ is. And without knowing anymore about what you are trying to achieve, I can’t give you guidance on that.

But here are some options for you in terms of increasing costs and quality – some of them may or may not apply or be useful to you.

1. Cheapest way to go would be with something like Yahoo’s small business solutions or any of the web hosting companies free site building tools – you have to do the work yourself, it is free, but you get the least functionality and customization.
2. Go to a known outsourcing sites like http://www.elance.com or http://www.guru.com – you can post your project on there, describe in general terms, solicit bids from (mostly overseas) vendors, and get a good quote on what it will cost to develop the site you like. Caution – as I said, most of the companies are overseas, so be prepared to deal with the language barrier, and in the end, you may still not get what you want as .. well.. you get what you pay for – most of the providers on there have their own understandings of what you are saying, and a lot of times, you will discover something is wrong long after the project is done. Also, since the providers are overseas, the NDAs are pretty much useless – they will gladly sign them, but you will obviously not enforce them.
3. Contact a web development company – as you have no frame of reference, you will have to go through the normal process in choosing a vendor and be very cautious and diligent about checking references (a must). You are likely to get much higher quality and maybe even the highest quality, for either the most expensive or the second most expensive price. It will all depend on the project manager employed by the company, and to a lesser degree – types of developers.
4. Contact your local ad agency – most of them do not have staff to handle these types of projects, but they outsource them to vendors they trust and have worked with in the past. Obviously checking references is a must here too, but this will probably be the most expensive option as ad agencies will mark up the costs of their vendors. What the ad agencies generally do have, is good project managers which is the key to a successful project.

I am going to throw out one final caviat here – if you are developing a web site – you can consider one of the four options I described. If you are developing an application – you pretty much have no choice but to search for an IT consulting companies in US that do application development – only they will understand what’s involved, and you will save yourself a TON of headaches that will come up after the application is launch and support calls start coming in.

Hope this helps.

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